How does a dilettante turn the 10,000 hour rule into a viable practice for herself?  The dilettante’s dilemma is that she is too interested in too many things to devote herself to only one of them.  She is a liberally educated vocational ignoramus.

Take heart, those of you insulted by my last remark; I walk among you, am one of you.

In one of Ericsson’s papers on deliberate practice and expertise, he gives a graph of expertise which looks logarithmic to me.  That is, the levels of skill that result from the accumulated hours of deliberate practice appear to me to be logarithmically related to the number of those accumulated hours of practice.  Intuitively this makes sense to me; our skill level tends to increase rapidly in the beginning, but then begins to plateau.  Even so, the logarithm is a monotonically increasing function.

Suppose that this function is in fact logarithmic.  The base ten log of 10,000 hours is four, while that of 1,000 hours is 3.  In other words, if this relation were in fact to hold true, then 1,000 hours of deliberate practice would yield 75% of the skill level of an expert.  Might this level of skill be competent?

Now consider our dilettante again.  Suppose she were to practice in domains orthogonal to one another; that is, one domain casts little, if any shadow upon another.  For example, math casts quite a long shadow on physics, but hardly any at all on dance apart from rhythm.

Suppose she had four or five of these orthogonal domains of practice in which she was “competent,” that is, had one thousand hours of deliberate practice in each; say math, dance, drawing, history, and meditation.  Consider what her experience of the world is like, its richness and depth, versus the world of the violinist who has given 10,000 hours of her life to the deliberate practice of the violin.  Could it be like the difference between Flatland and the world we live in?

What price glory?